Cats Aren’t Rude: They’re CATS!!
Let’s get this out there up front: NO ONE OWNS A CAT.
Cats are, always have been (and always will be!) amazingly individual little beings. I’ve known, believe it or not, close to 1,200 of them.
I was a cat rescuer and cat shelter operator for close to four years, and found homes, in that time, for close to 1,100 felines. Sadly, I also saw close to one hundred — mostly kittens — die then. Stroking victims of ‘infant kitten syndrome’ as they passed on was excruciatingly painful… but I considered it an important part of the job I was doing.
I could tell cat stories all day. But limiting to a few, let’s start with Sara, my first cat.
I was in a peculiar situation — in a new marriage, living in a three-generation household of females with me being the only male, and a male who worked at home, at that. That wasn’t working so well, since none of the females — ranging up a nearly-80 grandma with grand memories of her Greek heritage — could get their heads around the concept that someone could ‘work at home’. (That despite, of course, women had been doing precisely that for generations!)
My work day at home was constantly interrupted by competing radios and TVs and visits, to my lower-level office, by my wife. I quickly determined a change was needed… so I rented an apartment some miles away, so I had to get up in the morning as if I were going to work elsewhere, and then actually go to work elsewhere.
Out of the blue, I decided I wanted to have a cat at my work apartment. My then-wife and I went to a huge no-kill shelter, then housing close to 200 cats, and started looking for an office mate for me. The choices… oh, the choices. So many cats, some clearly interested in getting somewhere — anywhere — other than where they were. Some seemingly surrendered to the sad fact that they weren’t going anywhere.
Sara was among the former — a cat anxious to be somewhere else. She stuck a paw through the front of the cage and wagged it, begging for attention. I gave her some, then we moved on down the row.
But Sara wasn’t done. She continued to call after us — to me, in particular, because she ‘realized’ my wife wasn’t interested in cats (cats are smart that way) — even when we were 20–25 feet away. I turned to my wife and said, “That’s the one.”
At that point in my life, I really knew nothing about cats. Nothing! Sara was taken to the vet for a check-up and necessary shots, and I listened closely to the vet’s advice. (Sadly for her, Sara would never learn that advice included ‘never give cats popcorn’. She would have loved playing with it, but if she tried to eat it, it could have gotten stuck somewhere and killed her.)
Chatting all the while — as the vet had suggested: cats like the sound of your voice, and it helps bonds you to them — I carried her, carried-bound, into the apartment. Hesitant at first, she then slowly did some exploring… then disappeared. Typical, as I was to learn, cat behavior: She needed to figure out this new environment at her own pace, on her own time.
I worked for a while — I’m a writer, working mostly online — then said, “Goodbye, Sara. ‘See you in the morning.” And I left.
The next morning, Sara was no where to be seen… or even found, with a what I though was a good search of the two-room apartment.
Eventually, I found her hunched into a small space behind a shelf of phone books (remember them?)!
Long story short, after days of basically letting her do her own thing, seemingly (but not actually) ignoring her, she started getting curious enough to come onto my desk to see what I was up to. In time, she let me pet her.
This was back when PC monitors were monstrous things generating a lot of heat. Sara soon figured out that heat source was better than what the landlord was providing, and she made the monitor top her home whenever I was working.
Sara was at least 18 when she died. She’d enjoyed a long, stress-free life… except for the few occasions when a new cat was introduced into the environment. She always expressed some displeasure when that happened, but she always came to tolerate the newcomers. But she made it plain, in her way, that she was the queen of the house.
Her distinctive ‘mew meow’ lives on in the lexicon of this house.
Then there was Samantha. An absolutely gorgeous dilulte tortie — a tortoise shell cat with sort of pastel coloring — Samantha was totally feral (wild) when I trapped her, in a place that was not safe or healthy for her. I put her in a safe place — the lower level of my home, where my shelter for rescued cats was.
Somehow, she managed to get into a portion of the ceiling where she had room to move around but couldn’t be reached. She stayed there, whenever anyone was around, for the better part of 18 months.
I would stand — or sit, when I wanted to be there a while — and talk softly to her, saying reassuring things that, of course, she had no way to comprehend. But over time, she did grasp that I meant her no harm — that I was the source of the food, water and clean litter box she had access to, and used, when the room was quiet (and unoccupied by anyone but her).
In time, she’d let me ‘catch’ her out of her hidey hole: At first, she’d be on the floor but not near any of the amenities provided for her. Soon, though, she’d let me watch her eat, or drink — but not, heaven forbid, use the litter box! Even for cats, that’s a private activity.
In a matter of weeks, during which I continued my now-long ritual of staying well back from her and chatting to her — after a while, I’d just talk about anything: it was the soothing sound of my voice she was interested in — she’d let me inch closer to her. Inch by inch, almost literally.
Then, I was there, within touching distance. For a few days, I didn’t try. I just maintained my distance and kept up the soft chatter. On maybe the fourth day of that, I reached and touched her back. No reaction. I stroked her a bit. No reaction. Wow! I was making progress!
Slowly, ever so slowly, I kept at it — eventually rubbing my hand up and down her back, then… finally… stroking her head.
Samantha was almost tame!
No doubt she’d explored the lower level of the house quite thoroughly during her period of (sort of) self-imprisonment. She surely knew there was a stairway going… somewhere. She’d probably seen a door at the top, closed.
I opened it… and kept going down and talking to her and, as she was now allowing, petting her. And I left the door to the main part of the house open.
Cats are incredibly curious. My current house has a pantry, and regardless of how many times he’s seen that door open, current kitten Hank just has to go in and check the place out. (A few days ago, he ended up stuck in there for hours, in the dark, when he slipped in as I getting something and didn’t notice him. Today, he was right back at that door when he saw me approaching it. I had to physically remove him to prevent him getting stuck in there again!)
It didn’t take many days for Samantha’s curiosity to get the better of her, and up the stair she crept — probably a few times, before she finally ventured across a small landing into the living room. It was a big room, with big windows, with traffic noise coming through. And in next to no time, it was ‘her’ daytime room: She continued to sleep (somewhere!) downstairs, but during the day, she hung out in the living room.
When I had a bit of down time, I hung out there, too, watching TV. On 9–11, I had more down time than anyone wanted to then, glued to the images on the screen. That was maybe a month and a half after Sam first ventured up from the lower level. By this time, she was totally at ease with me.
Not just ‘at ease’, she was climbing all over me! All things (including the preceding 18 months!) considered, I couldn’t just lift her off like I would have if she were a ‘normal’ kitten: I had to gently encourage her to let me take her in my lap and stroke her so I could continue, horrified, watching history unfolding in lower Manhattan.
Turned out, she was OK with that. She sat with me for a while, getting gently pet, then she’d wander off, only to come back a bit later for more of the attention she’d come to crave.
She came and left at her pace, when she wanted to. Totally being a cat. Totally being, in fact, one of the most remarkable cats I ever had the pleasure to know.
We lost Samantha, by then fully a house pet, and a number of other felines when a couple of State of Connecticut Department of Agriculture apparatchiks decided they didn’t like how I was running my shelter — despite the fact I was paying a woman to come in 7 days a week to help me change 26 litter boxes twice a day! — and they rounded up a bunch of law enforcement cronies to help shut us down. All told, they hauled out 89 (well-cared-for) cats and three dogs.
We eventually got all three (personal) dogs back, but not before an attempt had been made to spay, for a second time, one of them. We also got back a couple of the cats.
(We had someone go into a distant shelter and ‘adopt’ one of them, a three-legger I’d saved from certain death after he’d been hit by a car as a very young kitten; a super vet I steered a lot of work to was able to save him bot not a dangling leg; The other, Sara, was literally stolen from a shelter by my then wife, who secreted the cat under her coat and strolled out when no animal control person was around!)
But we never saw Samantha again. Chances are, she reverted back to a near-wild or wild state, if she wasn’t put down. There’s a good chance many of the cats taken from us were put down, because most of them were not yet socialized enough to be adoptable.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that, being cats, being other than befriended by people was perfectly normal to them, and being killed for no good reason wasn’t unlike what had happened to literally millions of cats before them.
But Sara and tripod Tristan survived, and made the most, over long lives, of the close relationships they’d established with we humans.
We never claimed to own them, or to exercise any control over what they did or how they chose to live their lives. We simply provided them a safe place to live, and enjoy it.
